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maintained.
What's new at EBRI this month:
An Overview of Cash Balance Plans:
This feature article from the forthcoming July 1999 EBRI Notes outlines the pros
and cons of "cash balance" retirement plans, which have generated strong
interest among employers and workers, as well as considerable news coverage.
June 15 Release of
the 9th Annual Retirement Confidence and 2nd Annual RCS Minority Surveys.
The annual Retirement Confidence Survey (RCS) gauges the views and attitudes of working
and retired Americans regarding their confidence in preparing for retirement. The
RCS Minority Survey examines retirement views and attitudes of African-Americans,
Hispanic-Americans, and Asian-Americans. Click here for the June 15, 1999, press release.
June 17 Release
of the 2nd Annual Small Employer Retirement Survey (SERS). The annual Small
Employer Retirement Survey (SERS) gauges the views and attitudes of America's small
employers regarding retirement plans and related issues. Click here for the June 17, 1999, press release.
EBRI and the Financial Executives Institute/Committee on Investment of Employee
Benefit Assets are cosponsoring a symposium, "ERISA at 25: Applying the Experience to
Social Security Reform." This event will feature speakers from Capitol
Hill and the Clinton Administration, as well as Dallas Salisbury and members of the
Financial Executives Institute. The symposium is open to all EBRI members. Lunch will be
provided. For more information, contact Bill Pierron at pierron@ebri.org.
Date: Friday, June 25, 1999
Time: 9:00 a.m. - 3:00 p.m.
Location: Westin Fairfax Hotel, 2100 Mass. Avenue, NW, Washington, DC
The EBRI Issue Brief
and EBRI Notes for the month of
June are available online for ordering. The June Issue Brief is entitled
"Social Security Reform: Evaluating
Current Proposals: Latest Results of the EBRI-SSASIM2 Policy Simulation Model."
The June Notes articles are
"Multiemployer Pension Plans" and "Self-Funded ERISA Health Plans."
EBRI Research Findings for 1998-1999:
EBRI Workplace Benefits
Media Resources: Workplace Benefits of Great Interest to Graduates.
Valuable EBRI research on economic security realities facing job seekers in this
new economy, such as health coverage and retirement benefits is available on the EBRI
website. Journalists should consider EBRI's unbiased research and proven expertise for
their stories on the workplace.
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What's new in employee benefits:
- The American Compensation Association provides listings of human resources-related
congressional bills with links to the bills and to background information on the bills.
- Late-breaking
news items from the weekly publication Business Insurance are posted every
Friday before the Monday issue date.
- Click
here for the latest available issue of the Washington Status Report from the
research staff of Hewitt Associates.
- Click
here for the daily edition of the Society for Human Resource Management's newspaper, HR
News Online.
- Click
here for the American Compensation Association's Compensation & Benefits
NEWSLINE.
- The following items have been added to the General Accounting Office's Web site in
Portable Document (PDF) format:
If a title link above no longer works, click
here for the GAO Index of Reports and Testimony, FY99, and search for the report by
entering words or phrases from the title. Reports will also be added to GAO's
searchable WAIS database in ASCII and PDF formats within 24 hours of the original
posting. Any individual report may be retrieved directly in text and PDF formats with the
following URL: http://www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?RPTNO replacing RPTNO with the report
number (e.g., GAO/OCG-98-1).
If your computer does not already have the free Adobe Acrobat viewer
software to read PDF files, click
here for the one-time download necessary to read PDF publications.
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(6/30/99) The Agency for Health Care Policy and Research (AHCPR) announced in a press
release June 23, 1999, that it will "Fund Centers of Excellence for Research on
Health Care Markets and Managed Care."
(6/29/99) The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released June 24, 1999, Employer
Costs for Employee Compensation Summary for March 1999, with links to the tables
and a text version of the entire news release.
(6/28/99) The group Americans Discuss Social Security recently released a poll on
Social Security reform policy options. Click
here, then click on "Poll Data" (in small gray letters), then under
"May 1999" click on Action On Social Security: The Public Doesn't Want to
Wait.
(6/28/99) The Department of Labor's Pension and Welfare Benefits Administration
recently issued Interpretive
Bulletin 99-1, Payroll Deduction Programs for Individual Retirement Accounts,
which assures employers that payroll deduction IRAs are not ERISA plans.
(6/25/99) Click
here for remarks by Federal Reserve Board member, Governor Edward M. Gramlich, before
the Wharton Public Policy Forum Series, Philadelphia, PA, on April 22, 1999. He discussed
a wide range of issues, including his views on Social Security and raising the national
savings rate. Click
here for a report on his speech.
(6/24/99) Watson Wyatt's Global
Asset Study: Performance Book reviews and summarizes "in both qualitative and
quantitative terms the investment results of retirement funds in 18 countries around the
world."
(6/24/99) Click
here for the new report: Present Law and Background on Federal Tax Provisions
Relating to Retirement Savings Incentives, Health and Long-Term Care, and Estate and Gift
Taxes, prepared by the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation, and published June
15, 1999.
(6/23/99) The Commonwealth Fund has made available the following two reports, both
written by The Urban Institute's Marilyn Moon:
(6/23/99) A section on "Military Reservists and Employee Benefits" is
included in The
Mercer Report of June 8, 1999.
(6/22/99) The
2030 Center has posted When Good Jobs Go Bad: Young Adults and Temporary Work in
the New Economy (requires Adobe Acrobat reader) by Helene Jorgensen. Click
here for the executive summary of the policy report and click
here for the full document.
(6/22/99) The International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans recently released the
survey results of Employer-Sponsored
Group Long-Term Care Insurance: Did HIPAA Matter?
(6/21/99) From April 19 through June 4, 1999, Information Renaissance, in collaboration
with Americans Discuss Social Security, hosted a non-partisan electronic discussion and
debate on Social Security reform. Click
here to visit the National Dialogue on Social Security and to browse the archives of
this event.
(6/21/99) The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) has posted defined benefit
plan "Information on people based on State of residence; information on businesses
based on State in which plan administrator is located:" State-by-State
Information on Defined Benefit Pension Plans.
(6/18/99) Click
here for the Health Insurance Association of America (HIAA) White Paper: "Medical
Necessity" and Health Plan Contracts (March 2, 1999) based on a legal opinion by
Washington, D.C. attorney William G. Schiffbauer.
(6/17/99) Click
here for a U.S. Office of Personnel Management April 30,1999, Memorandum for Heads of
Executive Departments and Agencies, which contains an
attachment with an overview of rights and benefits, as required by the Uniformed
Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act of 1994 (USERRA).
(6/16/99) The Agency for Health Care Policy and Research (AHCPR) has released Racial
and Ethnic Differences in Health, 1996, which includes key statistics on the
health of Americans by race and ethnicity.
(6/15/99) The Internal Revenue Service is offering employers a chance to resolve
disputed tax issues relating to certain accelerated deductions claimed for accrued
employee benefits. Click
here for the IRS press release [IR-1999-50] issued June 1, 1999.
(6/14/99) The
Center for Retirement Research has posted two working papers:
(6/14/99) Wharton's Patricia N. Danzonn presents a review of research on pharmaceutical
price differentials in Do
Drug Companies Make Seniors Overpay?
(6/11/99) The Institute of Management and Administration's June 1999, issue of Managing
401k Plans contains "Investment
Education Still Not Helping Asset Allocation."
(6/10/99) Rep. John R. Kasich, House Budget Committee Chairman, announced a plan on
June 9, 1999, to save Social Security. Click
here for the press release.
(6/9/99) The Health Insurance Association of American recently announced its
"InsureUSA" proposal to help the uninsured. Click
here for the proposal and further information.
(6/7/99) The New York State Health Accountability Foundation, a private-public
partnership dedicated to promoting value-based purchasing, has released a study entitled New
York State HMO Report Card.
(6/4/99) The Heritage Foundation has released new policy papers:
(6/3/99) The IRS has issued final regulations revising the uniform premium table used
to calculate the cost of group-term life insurance coverage provided to an employee by an
employer. Go to the Federal
Register of June 3, 1999; then scroll down to the Internal Revenue Service; click on
[TEXT] or [PDF] for Group-term life insurance coverage costs.
(6/3/99) Economist Annamaria Lusardi has produced a preliminary draft dated April 1999
of her study entitled "Explaining
Why Households Do Not Save." Click
here for the tables accompanying this study.
(6/2/99) Click
here for the latest white paper from the President's Council of Economic Advisers: Families
and the Labor Market, 1969-1999: Analyzing the "Time Crunch."
(6/1/99) "Latinos
Fall Through Insurance Safety Net" by Rui Kaneya is a feature story in the May
1999, issue of The Chicago Reporter. This Web exclusive includes Chicago health
insurance rates by race and other health insurance graphics provided by EBRI.
(6/1/99) The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees has released
the following study which was conducted by The Segal Company: The
Cost Impact of Mandating Social Security for State and Local Governments.
(6/1/99) The European Commission released May 11, 1999, a Green Paper titled: Supplementary
Pensions in the Single Market.
(6/1/99) The Office of Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services
released a report on May 14, 1999, entitled: Review
of Inpatient Services Performed on Beneficiaries After Disenrolling from Medicare Managed
Care.
(6/1/99) Click
here for an August 1997, column by Scott Rodrick that is still timely: A Tale of
Two Acronyms: An "Employee Stock Option Plan" Is Not an ESOP.
(6/1/99) The National Academy of Social Insurance released three research briefs on May
20 relating to the elderly population, Medicare, and health care costs:
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